Archive for April 2011

The birther movement is insane. There can be no reasonable person who believes Barack Obama was born outside of the United States after he produced a long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii. It’s surprising anyone questioned it to begin with. But according to a Wall Street Journal poll conducted today, 27.9% out of 10,354 people stated that the release of Obama’s birth certificate did not settle questions about his citizenship. In other words, they think the certificate is a fake. They think that the President of the United States of America forged a birth certificate. Are you KIDDING me? That sounds like something a 16-year-old kid would do on photoshop, not the most powerful person in the world.

And this poll was conducted on the Wall Street Journal’s website. The Wall Street Journal is regarded as a very high-quality publication, and the people who read it are considered to be some of the smarter individuals who read newspapers. I’m not saying it’s true, but I think we can all agree that regular readers of the WSJ are not dummies. Yet around 28% of WSJ’s readers think this birther movement is legitimate.

Why? Well in addition to the fact that most WSJ readers are relatively intelligent, the paper also tends to have a large conservative readership. So my only thought is that these readers are so immersed in being conservative that they ignore facts and vote in the poll in whatever way suits their political interest.

And of all the things to criticize someone about, focusing on the citizenship requirement for being a president has to be one of the pettiest. Yes, it’s a constitutional requirement, and yes, you have to satisfy constitutional requirements to be President. But do we gain much from prohibiting non-citizens from becoming president? Many people who are born in the United States take this country for granted. Many who immigrate to the United States do not, and love their country more than those who have lived here for their entire life. Is there a valid policy reason for prohibiting non-citizens, perhaps those who love the United States more than anything else, from becoming president? Do we really have some secret fantasy that “foreigners” will become president and destroy the US in favor of their former country? Won’t people with evil intent or fake love for the country be rooted out in the extremely-invasive election process?

The same exact thing happens with people on the left attacking people on the right unfairly. But the birther movement has to be the most crazy recent example.